Month: July 2016

This page redirected some would-be donors to a fake website controlled by hackers, Reuters reports. (credit: Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee)

Yet another cyber-attack has targeted a Democratic Party organization—or more specifically, the party's donors. Reuters reports that the FBI is investigating a breach of the systems of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. While the details of the alleged intrusion were not revealed, visitors to the DCCC's site were apparently redirected to a malicious lookalike website mimicking the DCCC contribution page.

Visitors to the DCCC page who clicked a link to donate were directed to a look-alike domain name registered in June instead of the site of a donation processing contractor. The IP address of the fake site "resembled one used by Russian government-linked hackers suspected in the breach of the DNC," Reuters' Joseph Menn, Dustin Volz, and Mark Hosenball reported. Data collected included donor's contact information, e-mail addresses, and possibly credit card information.

It is not clear whether the attackers were after financial information for credit card fraud, or if they were collecting personal data for use in directed attacks against donors. But the attack's timing—or at least the registration of the domain used in the attack—matches up with the recent discovery of a Democratic National Committee breach. The DCCC shares office space with the DNC in Washington.

(credit: Julien GONG Min)

Microsoft plans to lay off nearly 3,000 more jobs over the next year across its smartphone hardware business and global sales division.

The latest cuts heap misery on Microsoft staff, after the software giant confirmed in May that 1,850 jobs would be lost at its mobile wing—even as its Windows and devices veep Terry Myerson insisted: "we're scaling back, but we're not out!"

Microsoft bought Nokia's devices and services business in 2013 for €5.4 billion ($7.1 billion), bringing with it what would quickly unravel into one of the worst tech acquisitions of all time.

On Thursday, SpaceX took another step toward reusing rockets when it fired the nine engines on the first stage of a Falcon 9 booster it launched in May. The company released video of the full-duration engine firing, which mimicked the length of a first-stage burn toward orbit, conducted at its test site in MacGregor, Texas.

This particular booster, which launched a Japanese communications satellite to geostationary transfer orbit on May 6, will not be re-flown. According to Spaceflight Now, the company designated it as a reference vehicle because it weathered extreme temperatures during its reentry into Earth's atmosphere. The rocket will undergo additional tests as engineers determine the readiness of flown boosters for additional flights into space.

This test plan is part of SpaceX's plans to re-fly the first booster it landed at sea, the rocket it used in April to launch a cargo delivery mission to the International Space Station. That first stage had an easier ride back to the surface because it boosted a payload into low-Earth orbit, rather than the much higher geostationary altitudes common for communications and spy satellites.

The Snowden-tanglement of Hollywood has begun in earnest, and that's not just a coy reference to Oliver Stone's upcoming, eponymous film. The worlds of hacking, digital transparency, and bombastic espionage are all coming together whenever possible these days. And in terms of how computer savvy is employed on-screen, we've seen the good (Mr. Robot) and the bad (Spectre).

Get ready for the ugly. Jason Bourne, the fifth film in the series, hits theaters this weekend with a few very good things going for it, including a few gargantuan action sequences and some stellar lead performances from Matt Damon, Tommy Lee Jones, and Vincent Cassel. But someone at Universal clearly wanted its globe-trotting, CIA-loaded thriller to hit a bunch of cultural-relevance bullet points, and the results are some of the most embarrassing technological shoe-horning you'll see in a film this year.

Go ahead, set your laptop on fire

Matt Damon's Bourne hasn't become a hacker since his last turn as the secret super-agent in 2007. In fact, he has checked out from anything resembling duty, instead turning to a life of... boxing to the death. (Really.) We find Bourne on the Grecian-Albanian border, busing from one bloody, bare-knuckled brawl to the next, and the only thing that interrupts his new, wholly unexplained career detour is a visit from an old CIA comrade, Nicky Parsons (played once more by Julia Stiles).